We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.
I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.
This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!
Can we ban bot-posted articles with incomplete body text?
Explain your methodology for posting this post, including any edits made to the original post.
Brave also has its own blockers built in. All of which, I’m told by this article, are still not as good as uBO.
Whatever. Just use Firefox for your daily driver and only use Chromium when absolutely necessary.
Or don’t. It will become obvious which browser has the better blocker.
I still hope as part of the antitrust ruling, they rip chrome from Google and undo this crap.
I’ve had good luck with uBlock Lite.
(Yes I could swap browsers but nah).
I might try uBlock Origin Lite, then if it doesn’t work very well then maybe I’ll just use Firefox
I guess Google are betting that only a small segment of power users will switch to Firefox, while the mass of ordinary people won’t be bothered enough to switch.
This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.
If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.
But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.
I think Brave said they arent affected by this
Why would anyone use that browser though? Besides all the rounds of shit it went through, the CEO seems like a nutcase. First he does anti-lgbt political donations, not just once, and has to resign from Mozilla among outrage after only 21 days as the CEO. Then he tweets uninformed shit about covid and has his staff remove criticism on reddit. Sounds like a real champ.
I mean I write Javascript, also his crestion so theres that.
I know some gay people who love Javascript and its always funny to remind them what the original creator of Javascript did
It’s addressed in the article. The brave CEO has stated they will continue to support manifest v2 as long as the needed code remains in Chromium. He made no promises what happens when it is removed, though (“I don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them”)
So that means they are just supporting it as long as it is easy to do, and that they are not brave enough to fork chromium.
They’re already a fork of Chromium… Also it doesn’t matter much since they use the Google extension store, which disabled uBO.
You could probably install and handle a manifest V2 extension by installing the xpi file manually. But as a developer, the users who would actually do this is a small fraction of the previous user base.
So how do you justify your limited manpower to be spent on that increasingly obscure user base? It may as well be removed anyways at that point.
